Month: January 2018

Okay, so I’m back. Besides my brief post about my latest “Sea Glass,” the last any of you heard from me was when I finally “won” NaNoWriMo 2017. Then the holidays happened, etc., and now, here I am, ready to debrief about my NaNo experience two months ago….mea culpa!

At any rate, was NaNoWriMo worth it? Sure. Will I do it again? Who knows? The experience pushed my natural tendency toward neurosis a bit further than it needs to be pushed and the resulting “novel” is certainly not pretty, as was to be expected. I’m a goal-oriented Type A person anyway, so the whole thing stressed me out more than was probably necessary (ie: if I say I’m going to write a novel, I’ll write it. I don’t know if I need a NaNoWriMo experience to accomplish that psychologically), but it was also kind of fun to be able to wear my Winner shirt with pride (yes, I bought one, which I wore all the way through December while I finally got around to decorating the Christmas trees).

If you do decide to tackle NaNoWriMo, however, I highly recommend buying Chis Baty’s No Plot, No Problem! I bought the book and I love how Baty walks Wrimoers through the experience, giving them tips on what to expect at each week of the process. Sure enough, when the month started, I bounded through the week, writing 2,000 + words per day on average. I also recommend using Scrivener as well, if only because it has a word-goal feature–that alone is cool and even though I’ve been using Scrivener for a few years, I didn’t know about the word-goal feature (Of course, I don’t know about a LOT of the Scrivener features….there’s a lot to learn). I intend to use the word-count goal with Scrivener on a regular basis going forward, for all writing projects.

After a couple of weeks of writing, however, I hit some snags. None were due to plot issues or tangles in character–at least not at first–but rather honest-to-God time-constraint issues. Thanksgiving may allow “a built-in holiday,” according to Baty, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, if you are the person who cooks all the food for all the people and decorates the house for the holidays, along with all your other life tasks, this doesn’t leave much time for writing–especially not regimented writing. Throw in a few high-stakes work commitments and some kid-driven dramz and pretty soon, you are about ready to throw in the towel.

Which I did. For three days, maybe four, I focused on the rest of my chaotic life, deciding that in the grand scheme of things, giving up on something as insane as NaNoWriMo wasn’t the end of the world…..it’s not like I stopped writing or anything. I do write–just not every single day for a month. I made excuses, excuses, excuses, until some ultra-competitive part of me that doesn’t like to lose kicked in around day four or five and I decided to finish what I started.

And then I did that, too. I kicked it into high gear and allowed myself to write the worst damn piece of crap I have ever probably written, and that includes the drivel I wrote in freshman creative writing seminars (lord, help me). Oh, man, it was bad. I didn’t delete it, but I should.

But I finished it. And I bought a shirt, which I wore with pride, even though most people have no idea why I was wearing a “Winner 2017” shirt. (“Winner of what? Huh? why, again?”) And there IS something to be said for being able to say, “I did that!” Even if what you did was incredibly stupid on the surface.

So, there’s that.

But what lessons did I learn? Here they are, in no specific order:

You can do whatever the heck you want to when you really want it. In this case, I wanted to write a complete novel in a month, come hell or high water. Goal accomplished. On with the next one!

I AM still a pantser. I feel, though, that if I had more time to linger and didn’t need to “finish” a specific word count, I could have lingered on places that needed lingering a bit longer. It would have been even more fun, given my personality. I was more focused on finishing than having fun. And writing should be fun, after all.

Too many characters….I just had too many. IF I rewrite this novel (highly unlikely), I will trim several. I’m no Dostoevsky. Clearly.

Make time each day to write–choose some goal (it doesn’t have to be 1,667 words, either)